The Sustainability Frontier: An Introduction
Defining the Frontier
President Thomas Jefferson spent the autumn of 1806 waiting impatiently for the return of longtime friend Meriwether Lewis. The President had acquired the Louisiana Territory from France three years earlier, doubling the land area of the United States, and had sent Lewis, Lieutenant William Clark, and the 33 volunteers that made up the Corps of Discovery to explore, map, and claim the newly acquired land, as well as the vast territories west to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark’s trip was so perilous that, lacking information to the contrary, Jefferson had for months presumed Lewis was dead. When he finally heard that the Corps was safe and returning, the intellectual Jefferson was first relieved, and then curious. He wanted to know everything. He wanted to hear of the native tribes, the buffalo herds, the geography of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Most of all, he wanted to hear that they’d discovered the hoped-for Northwest Passage.
Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., Lewis spread William Clark’s meticulously hand-drawn map on the Oval Office floor. On hands and knees, the President pored over the map and asked a seemingly endless stream of questions about this new American Frontier (see the title image for a replica of that map).[1]
The meeting was bittersweet for Jefferson. The mission was in many ways a success, but the news was not at all that he hoped. Jefferson had a vision of a United States that extended across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he had been counting on a navigable waterway to open the Western frontier to rapid settlement. But Lewis and Clark’s travels confirmed that there was no Northwest Passage. Reaching the West Coast instead demanded a brutal 65-day portage over the Rocky Mountains.
A dispirited Jefferson resolved himself to the fact that, without a Northwest Passage, settling the immense expanse of the frontier would take 100 generations.
Jefferson was wrong. Before the end of the century, in a mere five generations, the American frontier was settled and effectively closed. Jefferson failed to recognize the galvanizing power of his vision; a dream of a United States that spread “from sea to shining sea.” That vision unleashed forces that Jefferson could not have imagined. Technological forces, like steamboats, the telegraph, and the Transcontinental Railroad, would be turned to the conquest of the West. Policy forces, like the Land Grant Act of 1850, would push settlers westward. And Manifest Destiny would justify the Frontier Wars that drove native inhabitants off their homelands and onto reservations, clearing the way for a new “civilizing” order. Jefferson foresaw none of this.
Why the history lesson in a piece about sustainability? Because an analogous process of rapid frontier settlement is happening today. But instead of a geographic frontier like the American West, a Sustainability Frontier is spread out in front of today’s business leaders. The Sustainability Frontier is a conceptual frontier that progressively defines how products, companies, and industries will operate in the future. Territory by territory, industry by industry, the Sustainability Frontier is closing, settling the sustainability standards that businesses everywhere will be forced to adopt.
Unfortunately, most business people haven’t even recognized that the Sustainability Frontier exists. Those that have are, like Jefferson, unaware of the rapid pace at which it is being settled and closed.
The stakes are real. Some established companies on the Sustainability Frontier are already experiencing a fate analogous to the native tribes of the American West. Their once-profitable business lines are being pushed onto the reservation of falling profits as more sustainable pioneers homestead themselves in the minds and wallets of customers. Companies like McDonald’s and PepsiCo—known for fatty, sugar-laden fare—are ceding market share to the pioneers of fast, healthy, and sustainable, like Chipotle and Subway. A growing list of products — transfats, old growth virgin paper pulp, phthalates — and practices — child labor, bribery, animal testing, forced overtime—are being closed off the Sustainability Frontier in favor of more socially and environmentally responsible alternatives. Seller beware: the settlement of the Sustainability Frontier means major change for businesses in literally every market on the planet.
How a Frontier Gets Settled
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner—writing in the 1800s—was perhaps the first to lay out the process by which the American frontier progressively moved from a lawless, anarchic territory to a functioning civilization. Turner’s description of how the American Frontier was pioneered, civilized, and closed offers a model for what we are seeing today on the Sustainability Frontier.
As Turner documented, the idea and reality of the United States—and what it meant to be an American—was bound up in the frontier[2] and forged the American identity. The young country was defined by the explorers and pioneers[3] who encountered what seemed like a limitless expanse of essentially empty territory.[4] These figures are the first to explore the Frontier and create the maps that guide those who follow. Lewis and Clark were perhaps the most famous figures in this mode in American history. Explorer’s privilege, their status as lone figures in the wilderness allowed them to set their own rules separate and distinct from the prevailing norms of the states. (As an example, they ran the expedition as a democracy, granting William Clark’s slave York and the Native American woman Sacajawea an equal vote in key decisions, a practice that dissolved as soon as they returned to Washington.)
On the heels of pioneers come settlers in successive ways, from the adventurous and entrepreneurial to homesteaders and families looking for a new start. Once they achieve a critical mass of people, settlements become villages, towns, and then cities. Inevitably, conflicts arise between different settler groups, creating the need for law and order. One of the most famous examples of Frontier law was the Texas Rangers, a permanent roving posse formed to protect pioneers of the high plains from displaced Native American tribes that attacked homesteads.
As settlers move west so does civilization. The home country’s rules and regulations reach the hinterland and become institutionalized. Technology facilitates this process. The transcontinental railway, for instance, sped the people, products and policies into the heart of the American Frontier. The Pony Express, the telegraph and other communications innovations extended the reach of the “authorities” and improved the enforcement of rules and justice. Once the infrastructure of civilization is in place, the frontier ceases to be. Pressure for conformism becomes more powerful, and soon what was once frontier is integrated into the “civilized” country. Pioneering types grow impatient with the imposed order and move out to new areas.
This pattern repeated over and over during the settlement of the American Frontier. A frontier (Kansas, for instance) would become settled and closed, but a new frontier (Oklahoma) would open. The pioneers moved progressively on until the continent ran into the sea. Then there was no new land to explore, nowhere for pioneers or misfits or dreamers to move on to. By 1890 the US Census Bureau noted that there was no longer a discernible frontier line—it had permanently closed. While there were still pockets of wilderness and plenty of places where few people lived the entire continental United States was clearly under the jurisdiction of established rules and governance, the domains of political parties, elections, coalitions and citizens [5].
The Closing of the Sustainability Frontier
This cycle of pioneers, then settlers, then citizens converting the wilderness first to frontier and then civilization is at work on today’s Sustainability Frontiers. I say Frontiers, plural, because just as the United States in the 1800s was a territorial hodgepodge that included the original colonies, new states, claimed purchases, Indian Territories, and foreign powers, the conceptual landscape of the Sustainability Frontier is also a patchwork, but of issues: climate change, forced labor, corruption, deforestation, and so on (see image). Each issue functions like a mini-frontier with its own collection of pioneers and settlers. On the Sustainability Frontier these stakeholders include businesses, as well as non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and citizens groups, to name a few, each battling to establish its preferred solution as the market standard.
Just as Lewis and Clark were able early on to set their own rules, the first-movers on the Sustainability Frontier have had a great deal of freedom to take matters into their own hands. But the Sustainability Frontier is no longer a wide expanse of wilderness. For more than two decades the Sustainability Frontier has seen “land rushes” and rapid settlement around new opportunities or important issues. As people move in, individuals and independent organizations lose power while large players, collectives, and governments gain it. As larger portions of the Frontier are “civilized” through a combination of consumer demand, scientific knowledge, innovation, and government mandate, there is less open, lawless space available to navigate.
In this way the Sustainability Frontier closes. The rules of the game become “settled,” meaning that they can’t be unilaterally debated or challenged. Standard expectations are imposed uniformly across organizations and industries. Innovation and non-conformism are still possible, but they require greater effort, and they are much more expensive. Anyone wanting to change things has to work patiently within a defined system. That’s a whole new way to operate and it changes a business’ strategic sustainability calculus.
That is where we are today. Within two decades, the vast majority of what we consider part of today’s Sustainability Frontier will be settled and closed, the issues that make up the Frontier will matched by standard marketplace expectations that companies must adopt. There will be no more strategic options. There will simply be the tactical implementation of inflexible rules and de facto or real regulations, and therefore no strategic advantage to be found.
The reality is that right now, some pioneering stakeholder — it could be an activist, an entrepreneur, a regulator or more likely your competitor—is out on the frontier laboring to define what sustainability will mean for your products, business and industry. Inaction or ignorance in the face of this historic process could be fatal. To avoid the tragedy faced by North America’s natives, established companies need to understand the regions of the Sustainability Frontier that affect them. They need to swiftly survey the landscape to determine who the pioneers and settlers are, and how quickly the Frontier is closing. Then they need to craft a strategic plan of action to survive and thrive once those Frontiers are civilized and closed.
As you step out onto the Sustainability Frontier, consider me your guide and this collection of posts your map. In Chapter One, I present a brief History of the Sustainability Frontier, to offer some context on the waves of pioneers and settlers that have set up on the Sustainability Frontier to date, and how that history influences sustainability issues today.
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[1]http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/archive/ambrose.html
[2] The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, reacting to an announcement from the US Census Bureau proclaimed that there was no longer a definable “frontier” in the American West, believed that the closing meant profound change for the still young American nation. The frontier had shaped Americans, Jackson wrote, even as they shaped America. In 1893, Turner wrote an essay that delineated how the repeated process of settling and civilizing (in other words, creating mutually agreed rules, laws and governance) the frontier had made America unique. With the frontier closed, that repeated process was grinding to a halt and that had profound implications for the future of the country, Jackson believed.
[3] Both Native Americans who crossed a land bridge from Asia and later Europeans arriving across the Atlantic
[4] Note that despite perhaps twenty-five thousand years of human habitation in the Americas, population density was minuscule by European standards when Europeans arrived in the Americas
[5] Frontiers still remain. Despite Turner’s concerns that the closing of the geographic frontier was the end of America as it had been, Americans have continued to find new frontiers from the literal (space) to the metaphorical (genetic engineering).
